Businesses publish their prices and hide their availability, deliberately
404 words · about 2 min
The same 40 businesses publish a monthly price 66.7% of the time and show what is actually free to book 10% of the time. 54% have no way to book online at all.
- How it was measured
- Two passes over the same sample, chosen in a way that could not favour either answer, run four days apart — first for prices, then for availability. We checked the one booking system that does show availability by querying it directly, then read its terms of use.
- Last checked
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Watch it plot 26s · narrated · the same figures as above
We tested whether a certain kind of small business publishes its prices. It does — 66.7%. Then we tested whether the same businesses show which dates are actually free. 10%.
Same businesses. Same websites. Same software fetching them. Four days apart.
Why the two differ
A price is marketing. It is a label on a shelf, and posting it is how the business gets considered at all. In this market the monthly rate is the headline product, so it goes on the homepage.
What is free to book is operations. It is stock, and these businesses keep it behind a phone call on purpose, because a long booking is a relationship they want a conversation about.
54% of the businesses we could reach had no way to book online at all. The most common wording on the sites that did send you somewhere was a version of "contact our friendly staff". Those are the same fact seen twice.
The one system that does show it forbids using it
A single booking platform did show availability cleanly: no limit on how long a stay you could ask about, live figures per unit, no key needed to query it, about a second per request. We checked it against reality — a 90-night total matched what the operator published on its own price list, to the dollar.
Its terms of use forbid exactly this. Word for word: "Monitor the Site's availability, performance or functionality for any competitive purpose", and "Override any security feature or bypass or circumvent any access controls". The trick you would need in order to reach one chain's parks is the second clause.
Even then we would have covered 15-20% of the market, through one supplier, against its written terms. That is a conversation about a licence, not a data project.
The general form
If you are building anything that needs both a price and a live count of what is available, test the availability half first. It is the half that fails, and passing the price test tells you nothing about it. A market can look wide open for four days on the strength of a check that cannot see the problem.
The cheap tell costs one afternoon: look for a booking calendar, a sign saying what is free, or a stock figure. If what you find instead is a contact form and a phone number, that is your answer.
Tracked as INVENTORY-IS-KEPT-PRIVATE, RV-AVAILABILITY-DEAD. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.